Chapter 255: Lady Meera Once Again

Ulrich nodded.

He glanced once at the half-finished schedule on his desk, then turned it face down.

"Have refreshments brought," he said. "And tell the kitchens there will be a guest at dinner."

Fabian did not ask how Ulrich knew that Meera would likely stay for dinner.

"Yes, my lord."

Ulrich stepped out of the office and closed the door behind him.

He tugged twice at his left cuff as he walked.

The white linen sat properly over his wrist. The amber marks were higher, curled around the upper arm beneath the sleeve, and no part of them could be seen. There was no reason to check.

He checked anyway.

Then he descended the stairs.

The guest reception room lay on the ground floor, in the eastern wing, where the afternoon light came in long and gold through the tall windows. It was the room House Rubenhart used for visitors who were neither family nor petitioners. Merchants of standing. Envoys from tenant lords. People who were owed courtesy but not trust.

Two men stood outside its door.

Ulrich saw them before they saw him.

The first was impossible to miss.

Edmar filled the corridor the way a boulder fills a stream. His shoulders nearly brushed both walls. His arms were folded across a chest as broad as a wine cask, and the old scar that split his brow ran down into a beard that no barber in New Ruben had ever been permitted to touch. He wore a dark coat that someone had clearly tried to make presentable. It had not worked. On Edmar, even a clean coat looked like a threat.

Two Rubenhart maids passed at the far end of the corridor, saw him, and found somewhere else to be.

The second man was leaner, sun-cured, with hair the color of wet rope tied at his nape and a sailor’s knife hanging from his belt where a gentleman would have carried nothing at all. Grover. One of Meera’s hands. Ulrich remembered him from Grayhaven.

Grover was looking at a painting on the wall as though it had insulted his mother.

Then he noticed Ulrich.

Ulrich did not slow his pace.

He did not greet them.

He simply looked at them, one after the other, with a very critical gaze.

Edmar met it.

The giant inclined his head a fraction of an inch as acknowledgement.

"Count Rubenhart," Edmar rumbled.

Grover did not manage even that.

His teeth clenched. His eyes travelled once from Ulrich’s boots to his crimson hair, over the clean white shirt, the straight shoulders, the face that every maid in this Estate had apparently been sighing over for years, and something sour moved behind his weathered features.

His lips moved but no sound came out; he was cursing the noble who was gifted in literally everything in his life.

Ulrich’s gaze rested on him a moment longer.

Grover looked away first.

"Your knives stay in the corridor," Ulrich said, to neither of them in particular. "Fabian will have food brought to you."

"Aye, my lord," Edmar said.

Grover said nothing. His hand had drifted toward the hilt at his belt, not to draw it, only to hold it.

Ulrich opened the door and stepped inside.

The room smelled of salt.

Meera stood by the window with the light behind her, and she had clearly arranged to be found exactly there.

The pirate leathers were gone once again. In their place was a gown of white silk that fell to the floor in a single unbroken line, its bodice edged in pale blue like foam at the edge of a wave. Long gloves of the same blue covered her arms to the elbow. A wide-brimmed hat lay on the side table, discarded with the same careless grace with which she discarded everything she was finished with. Her hair, that beautiful sea-blue that no dye in Skargardia could imitate, fell unbound to her waist.

The blue coin hung at her throat.

She turned when the door closed, and her face performed a very good imitation of noble delight.

"Count Rubenhart."

She swept into a curtsy so deep and so flawless that Elana Etton would have wept to see it.

"You honor me with your presence. I feared the affairs of your great house would keep you from a humble visitor such as myself."

Ulrich stopped three paces inside the room.

"Meera."

She rose from the curtsy, and her eyes went over him from head to foot without any pretense of hiding it.

"My Lord," she breathed, one gloved hand pressing to the foam-blue edge of her bodice. "Forgive me. I had prepared a great many things to say, and I find I have forgotten all of them."

"Then we may proceed to business."

"Impossible." She took a step toward him, silk brushing over the carpet. "How is a woman to speak of business when the Count Rubenhart stands before her looking like that? You are more handsome than the last time I saw you. Considerably more. I did not think it possible and yet the evidence is before my eyes."

The door had not fully closed.

A deep voice came through the gap.

"You saw him a month ago."

Meera did not turn her head.

"That is the point, Edmar."

The door was pulled shut from the outside with a decisive click.

Ulrich, unimpressed by Meera’s futile flatteries, gave her a stern stare.

"You brought them into my house armed."

"I brought them into your corridor armed." Meera smiled. "Your house is where you are, my Lord, and I would never dream of bringing a blade into your presence. Only myself."

She closed the remaining distance between them.

Up close, the aristocratic mask did not slip so much as thin, the way ice thins over moving water. Her eyes, that deep sea-blue, held the same bright amusement they had held every previous encounters.

"You have lost weight," she said, in a rather different voice.

"I have been travelling."

"Mm." Her gloved fingers rose and, before he could step back, touched the collar of his shirt, straightening a fold that had not needed straightening. "Travelling. Yes. I heard that the roads near the capital have grown terribly dangerous. Ruffians, they say. Vicious ones."

"So I am told."

"How dreadful for you."

Her hand did not leave his collar.

Ulrich caught her wrist.

Not roughly. He simply closed his right hand around the blue silk of her glove and lowered her arm back to her side, and held it there a moment longer than was necessary to make the point.

Meera’s lashes lowered.

"You wound me, Count Rubenhart."

"You will survive it."

"I always do." She sighed theatrically and let him keep her wrist. "You have not offered me a seat. Your father would be ashamed of you."

"Sit."

"Where?"

"On a chair."

Her mouth curved.

"How specific."

She drifted to the settee beneath the window and lowered herself onto it in a spill of white silk, then patted the cushion beside her with two gloved fingers.

Ulrich took the armchair across from her.

Meera looked at the empty cushion, then at him, and sulked, though she seemed very amused.

"Two years," she said. "Two years I have known you, and still you flee from me as though I carry the plague."

"Why do you think," Ulrich retorted with a stare.

"Affection, my Lord. It is called affection. I am told it is quite common among people who are not you."

A knock sounded.

Fabian entered with a maid behind him bearing a silver tray. Tea, a decanter of Rubenhart red, two crystal glasses, and a plate of small honeyed cakes that the kitchens had somehow produced in the time it took Ulrich to walk down a staircase. The maid set the tray down without once looking at the guest and left the room rather faster than she had entered it.

Fabian poured.

"Lady Meera," he said, with a bow that was exactly as deep as it should have been and not one hair deeper. "The Estate is glad to receive you again."

"Fabian." Meera accepted the glass of wine with a genuinely warm smile. "You are the only man in this house who knows how to greet a woman."

"His Lordship has other qualities, my lady."

"Does he? You must list them for me sometime. I have been trying to discover them for two years, and I have found only one," she said, giving Ulrich a teasing look.

Fabian did not ask which one, or rather, was afraid to ask.

He bowed again and withdrew.

Meera sipped the wine. Her eyes closed briefly.

"Gods below," she sighed, and for a moment the noble accent was gone. "I forget, between visits, that you make this yourself. I ought to marry you for the cellar alone."

She was drinking the finest wine of the Rubenhart House after all.

"You would have to stop drinking it to marry me," Ulrich said sarcastically.

"Then no."

She set the glass down and leaned back into the settee, one arm resting along its curved back, and regarded him over the rim of her composure like a captain regarding weather.

"Now, the matters at hand," Ulrich said in a serious tone. "I hope you didn’t come here and put on this act and this tight gown for nothing?"

Meera smirked slightly.

God, she missed that arrogant, haughty tone of his.

She set the glass down.

"They will hear you," she said. "Not all of them. Not most of them. But the ones worth having will hear you, and that is more than I expected when I sailed out of New Ruben with your gold in my hold and your name in my mouth."

Ulrich said nothing.

"They have conditions," she went on. "Several. Some of them you will not like. One of them you will hate. And there is a thing they are all afraid of, and it is not you, and you had better hear about it before you sit down across a table from them at Barton’s."

She folded her gloved hands in her lap.

"But first," she said, and the mask came back over her face like a wave over a stone, "you are going to tell me what happened to your arm."

Ulrich’s right hand, resting on the arm of the chair, did not move.

His left, in its clean white sleeve, did not move either.

"Nothing happened to my arm."

"Ulrich," Meera said sweetly, "you have tugged that cuff four times since you walked through the door, and you are a man who does everything exactly twice."

Ulrich felt a faint twinge of surprise.

The cuffs were a habit. He had tugged at them since he was a boy standing before his father’s mirror, and he had long since stopped noticing that he did it. That Meera had noticed was not strange. She noticed everything that could be turned to her advantage.

But that she had counted, and from a broken habit had surmised that something was wrong with the arm itself, and not with the shirt or his temper or the day, sat oddly with him.

Had she felt something?

He remembered the aqua light that had crawled up her veins on the night she pulled him back from the edge of death.

He set the thought aside.

"An injury," Ulrich replied. "Nothing more."

"Mm."

Meera rose from the settee.

She did not hurry. White silk gathered and fell as she crossed the carpet, and Ulrich, who had known exactly what she was going to do from the moment she stood, found that knowing did not help him in the slightest.

She sat on his lap.

Sideways, her hip settling against his thigh and her arms winding around his neck before he could lift a hand to stop her. The wide skirt of her gown spilled over both of them. Her breasts, pressed high and firm within the foam-blue bodice, came to rest against his cheek with a softness that was entirely meant to tease him.

"You cannot lie to me, Ulrich," she whispered against his hair. "I know it is not merely an injury."

"I have no time for these exuberances."

Ulrich set his right hand against her waist and pushed.

Meera did not move.

She had, at some point in the last two years, learned exactly how to hold on to him. Her arms tightened around his neck, her gloved fingers laced together at his nape, and she leaned her weight into him so that shifting her would have meant either standing up with a woman hanging from his throat or resorting to force he wouldn’t use on her.

"I will continue," she said, and he could hear the smirk in it, "only when you have told me the truth, Ulrich."

"You have not begun."

"Precisely. And I shall not, until you do."

Ulrich turned his head.

Her face was very near. The sea-blue eyes met his without a trace of the wounded noble lady she had been playing a minute ago. There was mischief in them, yes. There was always mischief in them.

She was clearly not going to let go.

Ulrich exhaled.

Then he raised his left arm between them and, with two fingers of his right hand, drew the white cuff back from his wrist.

"An injury," he said. "As I told you."

Meera looked at the arm.

Then she took it.

Her gloved hands closed around his wrist and the sleeve, and she pushed the linen up past his elbow with a briskness that had nothing flirtatious in it at all, up and up until the fabric bunched at his shoulder and the whole of his upper arm lay bare in the amber light from the window.

The marks curled there beneath the skin.

Thin, branching lines the color of old honey, winding around the muscle like ivy around a column. They did not glow. They did not move. They simply lay there, worked into his flesh as though a very patient hand had inked them there over years.

Meera was silent for a moment.

"These are not ordinary marks," she said. "Nor some fashion of tattoo the young lords have taken up in the capital. Are they?"

"They are tattoos."

Meera rolled her eyes toward the ceiling.

"I do find you rather sweet when you try to lie to me, Ulrich. You are so very bad at it."

Her fingers began to move along his arm.

The pads of her gloved fingertips traced the amber lines slowly, following them around the curve of his biceps toward the inside of the arm, pressing lightly here and there as though testing the give of a hull’s planking.

Her fingers paused on the inside of his upper arm, a hand’s width above the elbow, and went still.

There.

A faint ridge in the skin, running all the way around the limb like the seam of a sleeve. It was almost impossible to see. A physician would have needed a lamp and a glass. But beneath her fingertips it was very visible, and along its whole length the amber lines thickened and crossed and recrossed, weaving over the seam in a dense lattice, like vines binding two halves of a broken branch.

Like stitches.

Stitches that had grown into the wood.

Meera’s smile vanished.

Her eyes narrowed, and the color in them seemed to darken by a shade, the blue of shallows giving way to the blue of deep water.

"My goodness," she said quietly. "What in all the hells happened to you?"

"You happened."

Ulrich stood.

He did it in one motion, rising from the armchair with his right arm braced against her waist, and this time Meera let herself be moved, sliding from his lap and finding her feet in a whisper of silk as he stepped past her.

Meera sighed, long and put-upon, and turned back to the settee. She lowered herself onto it, arranged her gown over her knees, folded her gloved hands in her lap, and looked up at him with a smile.

"Alright," she said.